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John Banville and Claire Messud reading new work

January 10, 2018

In Mrs. Osmond, his vivid and poignant new novel about a wholly modern woman, John Banville imagines a sequel to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. “He is one of the great living masters of English-language prose,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. Claire Messud’s new novel, The Burning Girl, is a hypnotic coming-of-age story about the bond of best friends and a complex portrait of female adolescence. “She has the imagination, the craft and the understanding of human nature to write about anything she chooses,” wrote the Chicago Tribune.